About
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, advised by Line Mikkelsen. My research interests lie broadly in syntax, semantics, morphology, and their interfaces. I work primarily with two languages: Karuk, an endangered language isolate of Northern California, and Tswefap, a Bamileke language of Cameroon.
Research
A Treebank of the Karuk Language
For my dissertation research, I am building a syntactic treebank of Karuk, combining syntactic annotation with an already richly morphologically annotated corpus of the language. Using the treebank, I'm investigating several aspects of Karuk syntax that would benefit from the larger-scale data offered by the treebank and would otherwise be time-prohibitive and highly work-intensive to investigate "manually" - including the complex agreement system of the language, pro-drop, and discontinuous NPs. The Karuk treebank would be the first (or at least one of the first) treebanks of a small, endangered language. Given global trends of language extinction and endangerment, developing tools to enable syntactic research on languages for which elicitation is impossible but which have relatively substantial corpora can help ensure that less knowledge from these languages is lost.
Quantification in Tswefap
Tswefap exhibits a surprising system of universal quantification whereby two grammatically independent words with apparent quantificational semantics, a determiner quantifier ndohk and adverbial quantifier awagha, are typically used together to express universal quantification, despite the fact that each word can express the same quantificational semantics on its own. My research investigates the meaning of these quantifiers and how they are able to compose with each other.
The Syntax and Semantics of Directionals
Large systems of directional affixes are well-attested in the languages of the Americas, but the structure and meaning of these have not been adequately addressed by linguistic theory. Addressing this gap, my research investigated the directional system of Karuk, one of the largest such systems with approximately 50 unique directional suffixes. I argue in my 2016 NELS paper that these suffixes comprise a new type of low applicative afforded by a PathP projection that is complement to VP, which accounts for their inability to combine with telic verb roots, which cannot contain a PathP.
Publications and Presentations
Chapters
To appear. Karuk. With Andrew Garrett, Susan Gehr, Line Mikkelsen, Crystal Richardson, and Clare S. Sandy. In The languages and linguistics of Indigenous North America, ed. by Carmen Jany, Marianne Mithun, and Keren Rice (de Gruyter). (Pre-print available here)
Papers
2016. Above or Below: Modeling a Telicity Restriction on Karuk Directional Applicatives. Proceedings of the Forty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, Volume 2: 317-330. (pre-print available here)
Presentations
2018. Comparison in Tswefap: Evidence for degree abstraction in an exceed-comparative language. With Emily Clem. Talk presented at the 48th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI. March.
2018. Discontinuous noun phrases in Karuk. Talk presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, Salt Lake City, UT. January 6th.
2017. Quantifier unification: Bipartite universal quantification in Tswefap. Talk presented at CUSP 10, UC Irvine, CA. October 21st.
2016. As above but below: Karuk directional suffixes as "low applicatives". Invited talks at Stanford's SMircle/Fieldwork Forum, April 8th, and UC Santa Cruz's S-Circle, April 22nd. Expanded version of NELS 46 talk.
2015. As above but below: Karuk directional suffixes as "low applicatives". Talk presented at the Forty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, Montreal, QC. October 16th.
2015. Exploring Karuk morphology in a parsed text corpus. With Andrew Garrett, Clare Sandy, and Line Mikkelsen. Talk presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, Portland, OR. January 8th.
2014. Developing a syntactically parsed corpus of Karuk. With Andrew Garrett, Clare Sandy, and Line Mikkelsen. Talk presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, Minneapolis, MN. January 3rd.
Edited volumes
2016. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. With Emily Clem, Virginia Dawson, Alice Shen, Amalia Horan Skilton, Geoff Bacon, and Andrew Cheng. Berkeley: University of California.
Teaching and Service
Courses
Fall 2015: Graduate Student Instructor. Linguistics 100: Introduction to Linguistic Science. Professor: Andrew Garrett. UC Berkeley.
Fall 2017: Instructor. Linguistics R1B: Endangered Languages: What We Lose when a Language Dies. Instructor of Record: Andrew Garrett. UC Berkeley.
Spring 2018: Graduate Student Instructor. Linguistics 120: Introduction to Syntax and Semantics. Professor: Line Mikkelsen. UC Berkeley.
Summer 2018: Instructor. Linguistics R1B: Endangered Languages: What We Lose when a Language Dies. Instructor of Record: Andrew Garrett. UC Berkeley.
Fall 2018: Graduate Student Instructor. Linguistics 100: Introduction to Linguistic Science. Professor: Peter Jenks. UC Berkeley.
Spring 2019: Graduate Student Instructor. Linguistics 120: Syntax. Professor: Peter Jenks. UC Berkeley.
Summer 2019: Instructor. Linguistics R1B: Endangered Languages: What We Lose when a Language Dies. Instructor of Record: Keith Johnson. UC Berkeley.
Fall 2019: Graduate Student Instructor. Linguistics 130: Historical Linguistics. Professor: Darya Kavitskaya. UC Berkeley.
Spring 2020: Graduate Student Instructor. Linguistics 100: Introduction to Linguistic Science. Instructor: Katherine Hilton. UC Berkeley.
Advising
Spring 2016: Graduate Student Mentor (with Amalia Skilton) through the Linguistics Research Apprentice Practicum (LRAP). Apprentice: Bridget Hanzalik. Project title: Morphological and Syntactic Structures of Ticuna
Fall 2016: Graduate Student Mentor through the Linguistics Research Apprentice Practicum (LRAP). Apprentices: Zeynep Özselçuk and Andrew Baker. Project title: Building a Syntactic Treebank of the Karuk Language.
Spring-Fall 2017: Graduate Student Mentor (with Emily Clem) through the Linguistics Research Apprentice Practicum (LRAP). Apprentice: Evelyn Najarian. Project title: The Tswefap Documentation Project.
Fall 2019-Spring 2020: Graduate Student Mentor through the Linguistics Research Apprentice Practicum (LRAP). Apprentices: Sammy Keyes-Levine, LaLa Speights-Barhatkov, Stuart Litjen, Jessica Wang, Cindy Yang (Fall 2019) Ciara Agrella, Jessica Butcher, Cindy Yang, Kevin Yu (Spring 2020). Project title: Building a Syntactic Treebank of the Karuk Language.
Discussion Groups
Fall 2015-Spring 2017: Co-organizer of Berkeley's Syntax and Semantics Circle (SSCircle)
Fall 2017: Co-organizer of Berkeley's Fieldwork Forum (FForum)
Conferences
February 5-7, 2016. Co-organizer. The 42nd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Awards
Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, 2019, UC Berkeley.